Contemporary Circus Education當代馬戲教育

ART.ZIP: Circus has a long history in China, but it hardly has a circus culture. Do you think circus culture is stronger within a western cultural context?

JE: There’s a long history of acrobatics and circus in China – in Russia as well. Both have a very strong tradition of circus, but aesthetically they’re generally closer to traditional circus. Contemporary circus is to traditional circus as contemporary dance is to ballet. So when you think about a ballerina, what they do is very codified: there’s a correct way for them to stand, move, set their shoulders, raise their arms, and so on. Everything is very strict and disciplined. Then when they go on stage the performers are replicating what they’ve learned – they’re aiming to show their technique as perfectly as possible and they’re judged on this perfection. With contemporary dance you learn technique, but the actual performance is shaped by what you want to express – about yourself, about the world, about society. This is more or less how it is with traditional and contemporary circus. Traditional circus is focused on the replication of technique, doing something spectacular or superhuman, while contemporary circus is using those circus techniques and methods as a language, as an art form, to express something.

In the west we also have a long history of traditional circus. During the 19th Century you had these really big circuses in Europe and America, and for some of the massive ones in the US you could get an audience of tens of thousands of people at each pitch. During the early 19th Century you had circuses touring locally to small towns and you can imagine what it would have been like for the people there: growing up in a small town you would have never seen an elephant before, never seen an acrobat, never seen a contortionist, so the circus brought something that was amazing – something that was totally outside of ordinary life. Because of that power to amaze, and because of the power of spectacle, it became the biggest form of popular entertainment in the western world. Eventually film came along, which was cheap and easier to distribute, and oil prices went up so that it became more expensive to tour, and traditional circus sort of collapsed. Contemporary circus rose out of that, and because the old model didn’t work anymore it had to find something new.